How Upstox Used CTV to Sell the Hardest Thing in India: Trust

Key Takeaways

• Fintech's core marketing problem is not desire or memory but trust — and trust is the hardest thing in the world to advertise, because you cannot claim it, you have to signal it.
• Upstox's whole strategy is a trust-manufacturing machine: a celebrity guarantor (Amitabh Bachchan), a mass-legitimacy stage (IPL), and education that lowers fear — and CTV is where all three converge.
• The big screen itself is a credibility signal: showing up well on the living-room TV makes a young app feel like an established institution, which is exactly what a nervous first-time investor needs to see.
• In a country of many languages and a huge non-metro opportunity, regional-language creative is not a nicety — Upstox's localized push reportedly drove a 3x lift in registrations from non-metro India.
• Education is the most underrated performance lever in fintech: 'edutainment' that teaches while it sells lowers the fear barrier and converts skeptics into users better than any hard-sell ad.
• CTV lets a fintech pair brand-scale trust-building with measurable, app-install performance — the emotional reach of TV with the closed-loop accountability of digital, in one channel.
• Advertising financial products to first-time, non-metro investors carries real responsibility — the brands that build durable trust are the ones that educate honestly rather than over-promise returns.

The Hardest Sale in the World

Some things are easy to sell. A cold drink on a hot day. A pair of good-looking earbuds to a teenager. A detergent that actually cleans. The pitch writes itself, because the product delivers something the buyer already wants and can judge for themselves in minutes.

Now try selling this instead: give me your money — your actual, hard-earned savings — and let me put it into a stock market you do not understand, through an app on your phone you have never heard of, run by a company barely a decade old, in a country where a whole generation was raised to believe the share market is a casino where ordinary people go to lose everything. Do not worry, it says on the screen. Trust us.

That is the sale Upstox had to make. And it is, without exaggeration, one of the hardest marketing problems that exists. Because Upstox was not selling a product people wanted. It was selling something people were actively afraid of, wrapped in a technology they did not fully trust, in a category littered with stories of ruin. The barrier was not desire. The barrier was fear. And you cannot discount your way past fear, meme your way past it, or out-shout it. You have to dismantle it, brick by brick, and replace it with the single most expensive thing a brand can ever acquire: trust.

This is the story of how Upstox did exactly that — how a company born from a few friends' obsession with algorithmic trading grew into one of India's largest brokers by treating trust as the actual product, and how the tools it reached for — a legendary celebrity face, the vast stage of the IPL, regional-language storytelling, education-as-marketing, and increasingly the trusted big screen of Connected TV — add up to a masterclass in selling the unsellable. And it is a teardown with a transferable lesson for every brand that has ever had to earn belief before it could earn a rupee.

Who Is Upstox, and the Mountain It Had to Climb

Upstox began life not as Upstox but as RKSV Securities, founded around 2009 by a small group of founders — the brothers Ravi and Raghu Kumar, along with Shrini Viswanath — who came to broking through a shared obsession with algorithmic trading. RKSV later rebranded to the friendlier, more consumer-facing name Upstox, and set itself a democratic mission: make stock trading and investing simple, cheap and accessible to ordinary Indians, not just the wealthy and the initiated.

The ambition attracted serious backing. In 2016, Upstox raised funding from none other than Ratan Tata — a name that in India is practically a synonym for trust — alongside Kalaari Capital. Then in 2019, Tiger Global came in with a reported 25 million dollars, taking a stake of around 31%, and by 2021 Upstox had crossed into unicorn territory, part of a total funding haul reported in the region of 220 million dollars across its rounds. This was not a fragile startup; it was a well-capitalised contender with blue-chip investors behind it.

But capital does not buy customers, and the market Upstox was charging into was brutal. Sitting at the top was Zerodha — the bootstrapped, beloved, famously marketing-light discount broker that had effectively created the modern Indian discount-broking category and earned a fierce, loyal following almost entirely through word of mouth and product quality. Alongside and behind came Groww, with its content-led, beginner-friendly approach, and Angel One, and others. To win, Upstox could not simply be another cheap broker. It had to out-trust an incumbent whose entire brand was trust.

And then there was the country itself — not one market but dozens. India is a staggering diversity of languages, cultures, income levels and financial literacy, and the biggest growth opportunity in broking was not the English-speaking, market-savvy metros where Zerodha was already strong. It was the vast, under-penetrated non-metro India — the smaller cities and towns where tens of millions of first-time potential investors lived, most of whom had never bought a share in their lives and many of whom were deeply wary of the whole idea. Reaching them meant speaking their languages, addressing their specific fears, and doing it at enormous scale. Three mountains, then: a fearsome incumbent, a nation's worth of fragmentation, and the fundamental terror of the product itself.

Why Trust Is the Only Product That Matters Here

It is worth slowing down on this, because it is the hinge the entire strategy swings on. In most categories, trust is a nice-to-have — a tiebreaker between products that are otherwise similar. In fintech, and especially in investing, trust is not a tiebreaker. It is the whole product.

Think about what a broker actually asks of a customer. Not a few hundred rupees for a gadget you can return if it disappoints, but access to your savings, your financial future, your safety net — placed inside a system you cannot see, controlled through a screen, with real money genuinely at risk. Every fear a human being can have about money is activated at once: fear of losing it, fear of being scammed, fear of looking foolish, fear of a complexity you do not understand. A first-time investor in a non-metro town is not evaluating features and fees. They are asking one question, over and over: can I trust these people with my money?

If the answer is no, nothing else matters. The lowest brokerage fees in India are worthless if the customer is too afraid to open an account. The slickest app is useless if it feels like a trap. This is why fintech marketing that leads with product features so often fails to crack the mass market — it answers questions the anxious customer has not yet reached, while ignoring the only question they are actually asking. The job is not to explain the product. The job is to make the fear go away.

And that reframes everything Upstox did. The celebrity, the cricket, the education, the regional language, the big-screen presence — read individually they look like a scattergun of marketing tactics. Read correctly, they are all the same tactic aimed at the same target: they are trust-manufacturing devices, each one a different way of answering can I trust you? at scale. Once you see that, the strategy stops looking like a grab-bag and starts looking like an engine.

Borrowing Belief: The Amitabh Bachchan Play

If your central problem is that a nervous nation does not yet trust you, one of the fastest ways to acquire trust is to borrow it from someone who already has it in abundance. Upstox borrowed from arguably the largest reservoir of public trust in the country: it made Amitabh Bachchan its brand ambassador.

It is hard to overstate what a figure like Bachchan represents to the Indian public — not merely a celebrity but an institution, a voice associated across generations with authority, dignity and reliability. When a face like that stands behind a financial platform and effectively says this is legitimate, take it seriously, it does something no feature list can do. It short-circuits the fear. A first-time investor who has never heard of Upstox, and who would never trust an unknown app with their money, will extend a provisional trust to a company that Amitabh Bachchan is willing to be associated with. The celebrity is not decoration. The celebrity is collateral.

This is a deliberate, and expensive, strategic choice — and a telling one. Where rivals like Zerodha leaned on product and word of mouth, and Groww leaned on educational content, Upstox chose the high-cost, high-visibility path of mass credibility: buy the biggest possible trust signal and broadcast it as widely as possible. That choice implies a specific belief about the market — that in mass, non-metro, first-time India, the fastest route to scale is not the slow accretion of product reputation but the rapid transfer of borrowed institutional trust from a figure the whole country already believes in.

The transferable principle is bigger than one star. When you are new and unknown and asking for something as loaded as trust, one of your most powerful moves is to associate yourself with an entity your audience already trusts, and let that credibility flow onto you. It can be a celebrity, a blue-chip investor like Ratan Tata, a respected institution, a certification, a partnership. Upstox stacked several of these — Tata's backing, Bachchan's face — precisely because in a trust-first category, borrowed belief is the fastest belief there is.

The IPL: Legitimacy at the Scale of a Nation

Borrowing a trusted face solves credibility. It does not, by itself, solve scale — you still have to put that credibility in front of hundreds of millions of people, in a context that itself confers legitimacy. In India, there is one stage that does both better than any other, and Upstox bought its way onto it: the Indian Premier League.

Upstox signed a major multi-year association with the IPL — a deal reported around 145 crore rupees for a multi-season sponsorship beginning in 2021, and it continued as a digital sponsor into later seasons including IPL 2024. The IPL is not just the largest sports property in India; it is a national event, a shared ritual that unites the entire country, metro and non-metro, across every language and income level, in front of a screen at the same time. For a brand trying to reach all of India at once, there is simply no bigger, more attention-rich stage.

But the deeper value of the IPL for a fintech is not just reach — it is legitimacy by association. The brands that sponsor the IPL are, in the public mind, the big, serious, established players. When a young broking app appears alongside the giants in that context, week after week, in the middle of the nation's favourite spectacle, it borrows the event's authority. It stops looking like a risky unknown and starts looking like an established name — a member of the club of brands big enough to be there. For a company whose entire challenge is to feel trustworthy and established, being visibly part of the IPL is a shortcut to exactly that perception.

And Upstox has used that stage to carry a specific message, not just a logo. Campaigns tied to cricket have pushed the idea that investing is for the ordinary young Indian, that it is not as complicated or as frightening as it seems, that finance should be taken seriously but is not out of reach. The 2024 'Invest Right' effort, aligning cricketers with financial experts around the T20 World Cup, was reported to have generated over 500 million impressions and accompanied a 15% quarter-on-quarter rise in mutual-fund assets under management. Whatever the precise attribution, the pattern is clear: the biggest stage in the country, used not merely to be seen, but to normalise the very behaviour Upstox needs its customers to adopt.

Speaking the Language of the Next Hundred Million

A trusted face on the biggest stage gets you national fame. It does not, on its own, get you the non-metro first-time investor, because that person does not just need to see you — they need to feel that you are speaking to them, in their language, about their specific fears. This is where Upstox's strategy gets genuinely sophisticated, and where it maps most precisely onto what Connected TV can do.

India is not a single audience; it is a subcontinent of them. An investing message crafted in polished urban English, aimed at a first-time investor in a smaller city who thinks and worries in Hindi, or Tamil, or Marathi, or Bengali, will bounce off. The fear is local, the aspiration is local, and the reassurance has to be local too. Upstox understood that reaching the next hundred million investors meant regional-language storytelling — ads that spoke to real people in their own tongue, using their own cultural reference points, addressing the anxieties they actually held.

The results reportedly bore this out. Upstox's 'Start Karke Dekho' push — built around demystifying investing, regional-language spots, and the radically low barrier of opening an account and starting with as little as 100 rupees — was credited with driving a roughly 3x lift in registrations from non-metro India. Read that again: not a marginal improvement, a tripling, from the simple, disciplined act of speaking to people in their language about a fear they actually felt, and lowering the entry stakes to something anyone could risk. Localization was not a translation exercise. It was the difference between being ignored and being trusted.

This is exactly the kind of precise, segmented, many-versioned storytelling that a modern channel is built to deliver — the same discipline as any serious [audience-targeting](/resource/blogs/audience-targeting-meta-ads) effort, carried onto the biggest screen in the house. A national brand message can be split by region and language, matched to the household, and delivered at scale — the reach of television with the precision of digital. Which brings us, finally, to the screen where all of these threads come together.

Why Connected TV Is the Fintech Trust Machine

Everything Upstox needs to do — signal credibility, broadcast a trusted face, reach non-metro India in local languages, educate away fear, and still measure app installs like a performance marketer — points toward one channel that can do all of it at once. That channel is Connected TV, and it is close to a purpose-built trust machine for fintech.

Start with the context. The living-room television is, culturally, the most trusted screen in the house. It is where families gather, where the news and the big matches and the shared entertainment live; it carries an inherited authority that a phone notification or a social feed simply does not have. An ad seen there, on the big screen, sound-on, in that trusted setting, borrows some of that trust automatically. For a fintech whose entire problem is credibility, simply showing up well in that environment is a credibility signal — the same reason a young brand looks more established on the big screen than it ever could in a muted feed. It is the modern inheritance of the old CRT living room, and it does for Upstox's legitimacy what it once did for a detergent jingle's memorability. (The same big-screen legitimacy effect is why brands as different as an audio label and a heritage FMCG name are converging on this screen — see how [boAt rode the CTV wave](/resource/blogs/boat-ctv-advertising-india) and how the [Nirma jingle's living-room magic](/resource/blogs/nirma-jingle-crt-to-ctv-advertising) is being rebuilt for the connected age.)

Now add the digital layer, because this is where CTV outclasses the old television Upstox's rivals grew up on. Connected TV is addressable: Upstox can serve a Hindi creative to a household in a Hindi-speaking region and a Tamil one to a household in Tamil Nadu, aim its message at the non-metro, first-time-investor segments it most wants, cap frequency so it builds familiarity without irritation, and swap or tweak creative quickly when something is not landing. The regional-language, segment-specific strategy that is central to reaching the next hundred million investors is not just possible on CTV — it is native to it.

And then, crucially for a company that thinks like a performance marketer, CTV closes the loop. It can be made interactive and shoppable — a QR code on the big screen that a curious viewer scans to jump straight to downloading the app and opening an account, turning a moment of persuaded trust directly into a measurable install. Impressions, completion rates, view-through, post-exposure app opens — the channel offers the accountability of digital on top of the reach and trust of television. For Upstox, CTV is the one place where brand-scale trust-building and measurable, install-driven performance stop being a trade-off and become the same motion.

Education Is the Real Performance Lever

There is one Upstox tactic that deserves its own spotlight, because it is the most underrated growth lever in all of fintech and the one most directly suited to the big screen: teaching. Not selling disguised as teaching — actual education that lowers the fear barrier and, in doing so, converts.

Remember the core problem: people are not resisting Upstox because they dislike it, but because they are afraid of and confused by investing itself. The most powerful thing you can do to a confused, frightened prospect is not to shout a sales message at them — it is to gently make them less confused and less afraid. Every basic concept explained, every myth punctured, every this is simpler than you think delivered kindly, chips away at the fear that is the real thing standing between the viewer and an account. Education does not just build goodwill. It removes the specific obstacle blocking the sale.

This 'edutainment' — a little market basics here, a demystifying tutorial there, wrapped in something watchable rather than dry — is what turns a brand from a pushy salesman into a trusted teacher, and 'trusted teacher' is precisely the identity a fintech needs in a low-literacy market. It is also a positioning that compounds: the brand that taught you how investing works, in your language, without condescending, is the brand you open an account with, and the one you recommend to your equally nervous cousin. Zerodha understood this instinct early with its Varsity education platform; Groww built much of its brand on beginner-friendly content. Upstox's edutainment is the broadcast, mass-reach version of the same insight.

CTV is an unusually good home for this. The big-screen, sound-on, lean-back, longer-format environment gives you room to actually explain something — to tell a small story that teaches, rather than a six-second bark that sells. You have a genuinely attentive household for the length of a non-skippable spot. That is enough time to lower a fear. The lesson for any brand in a complex or intimidating category — insurance, health, finance, B2B software — is the same: if confusion is the barrier to your sale, then teaching is your highest-performing marketing, and the channel that gives you room to teach at scale is where you should be.

The Asterisk: The Responsibility of Selling Belief

A teardown that only celebrates how effectively Upstox manufactures trust would be dodging the hardest and most important question in the whole story — and, frankly, would be weaker content for it. Because when the product you are so skilfully selling is access to a market where real people can lose real money, the ethics of the persuasion are not a footnote. They are the point.

Here is the uncomfortable tension. Everything that makes this marketing effective — the borrowed authority of a beloved celebrity, the legitimacy of the IPL, the reassuring this is easier than you think message, the low 100-rupee barrier that removes the last hesitation — is also, precisely, a set of tools for lowering a nervous person's guard about putting their savings at risk. The very fear these campaigns dissolve is, in part, a rational fear. Investing does carry risk. First-time, non-metro investors, newly persuaded that the market is simple and safe and endorsed by people they admire, are exactly the cohort most likely to be hurt if they mistake a well-marketed app for a guarantee of returns. Trust, manufactured too well and pointed carelessly, can do harm.

This is not a hypothetical concern in Indian fintech; it is an active regulatory and cultural conversation. There is real scrutiny — from the market regulator and from the public — on how brokers advertise to first-time investors, on the difference between encouraging financial participation and encouraging reckless speculation, on the duty of care a platform owes the anxious newcomer it just convinced to start. It is telling that Upstox itself leans on the language of ethics and doing right by customers in how it talks about its partnerships and its brand. Whether any given campaign lives up to that is a fair question to keep asking.

And here is where the ethics and the strategy actually converge, which is the genuinely interesting part. In a trust-first category, the brands that win in the long run are the ones whose trust is earned honestly — that educate rather than over-promise, that show risk alongside opportunity, that build customers who succeed and stay rather than customers who get burned and flee. Manufactured trust that outruns the reality of the product is a short-term loan that comes due, often brutally, in a category where a single wave of burned first-timers can poison a brand for a generation. The responsible version of this marketing — teach honestly, set real expectations, make the customer genuinely more capable — is not just the ethical choice. It is, in a trust-based business, the only durable growth strategy there is.

The Teardown: What Marketers Should Steal

Strip the Upstox story down to its transferable logic and you get a set of principles for any brand that has to earn belief before it can earn a sale — which, increasingly, is most brands. This is the part to keep.

One: identify the real barrier, and aim everything at it. Upstox's barrier was not price or awareness; it was fear. Its entire strategy — celebrity, cricket, education, language — is a single coordinated assault on that one barrier. Diagnose the actual thing standing between your audience and the sale, and align every tactic against it, rather than scattering effort across problems your customer does not have.

Two: when you lack trust, borrow it. Associate yourself with the people, institutions and contexts your audience already believes in — a Bachchan, a Tata, an IPL, a certification — and let that credibility transfer onto you. Borrowed belief is the fastest belief, and stacking several trusted signals compounds the effect.

Three: use big, legitimate stages to look established. Part of what the IPL and the big screen buy is not reach but status — the perception of being a serious, established player. For any challenger, showing up well in a high-legitimacy context is a shortcut to being treated as legitimate.

Four: localize as strategy, not decoration. Upstox's regional-language push reportedly tripled non-metro registrations because it spoke to real fears in real languages. In a fragmented market, meeting people in their own tongue and context is not a translation task — it is the difference between being ignored and being trusted.

Five: if confusion is the barrier, teaching is your best marketing. Education that genuinely lowers fear is the highest-performing content in any complex or intimidating category, because it removes the actual obstacle to the sale while positioning you as the trusted expert. Design to make your customer more capable, not just more sold.

Six: pick the channel where trust and measurement meet. CTV let Upstox combine the trusted, big-screen, regional, educational brand-building it needed with the addressable, measurable, install-driving performance it wanted — in one motion. When your job is both to earn belief and to prove ROI, choose the channel that refuses to make you choose. Doing that well is a full-funnel [campaign-planning](/guides/campaign-planning-guide) discipline, not a single clever ad.

How to Sell Trust on CTV Yourself

If your brand also has to earn belief before it earns a sale — a fintech, an insurer, a health product, a new B2B platform, any category where the customer is afraid or confused — here is the reverse-engineered blueprint, ready to brief.

Diagnose the fear before you write a word. Get specific about the exact anxiety or confusion standing between your audience and action — not the generic 'awareness' problem, but the real human hesitation. Everything downstream should be built to dissolve that specific fear.

Assemble your borrowed trust. Identify the credible signals available to you — a respected ambassador, a blue-chip backer, a recognised certification, a legitimate partnership or platform — and put them to work as guarantors. You are not buying fame; you are buying the transfer of belief.

Build for the trusted big screen. Produce CTV creative that exploits the living room's inherited authority: calm, credible, well-crafted, sound-on storytelling that makes you feel established and safe, not a frantic thumb-stopping hard sell. Let the medium's legitimacy do part of the persuading.

Localize deliberately, and target precisely. Create regional-language, culturally specific versions for the segments that matter most — especially the under-penetrated ones — and use CTV's addressability to deliver the right language and message to the right household, with sensible frequency caps.

Lead with education, not the pitch. Teach the fearful, honestly and without condescension, using CTV's longer, attentive format to actually lower confusion. Make the viewer more capable and you make them more willing; the sale follows the reassurance.

Close and measure the loop. Give the persuaded viewer an immediate, frictionless path to act — a QR code straight to a low-barrier first step — and instrument everything: completion, view-through, app installs, activation. Then hold yourself to the honest version: build trust you can actually keep, because in a trust-based category, over-promising is a debt that always comes due.

The Real Product Was Never the App

So what did Upstox actually sell to millions of first-time Indian investors? Not the lowest brokerage rates, though it had them. Not the slickest trading app, though it built one. It sold the courage to begin — the small, hard-won belief in a nervous household that this is legitimate, this is for people like me, this is not as frightening as I feared, and I can trust these people with my money. The app was the thing they downloaded. Trust was the thing they actually bought.

That is the deepest lesson of the whole saga, and it reaches far beyond fintech. In any category where the customer is afraid, confused, or being asked to change a deeply held behaviour, you are not really selling a product. You are selling belief — and belief is built, not bought, through credibility borrowed and earned, through legitimacy signalled on the right stages, through meeting people in their own language, and above all through teaching them until the fear gives way. Upstox reached for a legendary face, the nation's favourite game, a dozen languages, and the trusted big screen of the living room, and assembled them into a single machine for turning fear into faith.

Connected TV matters in this story because it is the one channel where every piece of that machine can run at once — the trust of television, the precision of digital, the room to educate, and the measurability to prove it worked. It is where a brand can build belief at the scale of a nation and still count the installs. For any marketer whose real product is trust, that combination is not a nice-to-have. It is the future of the job.

boAt sold aspiration. Nirma sold a memory. Upstox sold trust — the hardest sale of all. And it did it by understanding, better than most, that the screen in the living room was never just a place to be seen. It was a place to be believed.

Sources and a Note on the Facts

The load-bearing details here — Upstox's origins as RKSV Securities and its founders, the backing from Ratan Tata and Tiger Global and the roughly 220-million-dollar total funding, the competitive context against Zerodha and Groww, the Amitabh Bachchan brand ambassadorship, the multi-year IPL association reported around 145 crore rupees, the 'Invest Right' and 'Start Karke Dekho' campaigns with their reported 500-million-plus impressions and roughly 3x non-metro registration lift, and India's Connected TV market context — are drawn from business reporting, company statements and market research. Figures and attributions vary between sources and over time, and some campaign results reflect broader marketing efforts rather than CTV in isolation, so treat the specific numbers as directional rather than exact. Nothing in this article is investment advice.

• [India's fastest-growing broker Upstox raises USD 25 million from Tiger Global — PR Newswire](https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/india-s-fastest-growing-broker-upstox-raises-usd-25-million-funding-from-tiger-global-817230463.html)
• [Upstox turns unicorn: raises $25M from Tiger Global — YourStory](https://yourstory.com/2021/11/fintech-funding-upstox-turns-unicorn-raises-25m-tiger-global)
• [Upstox: from sub-brand to challenger — the credibility pivot in Indian discount brokerage — MarkHub24](https://www.markhub24.com/post/upstox-from-sub-brand-to-challenger-the-credibility-pivot-in-indian-discount-brokerage)
• [What makes Upstox a great IPL partner is its commitment to ethics — Exchange4media](https://www.exchange4media.com/marketing-news/what-makes-upstox-a-great-partner-for-ipl-is-the-brands-commitment-to-ethics-112262.html)
• [How Upstox's marketing strategy earned it a spot in IPL 2021 — Unstop](https://unstop.com/blog/upstox-marketing-strategy)
• [Upstox marketing strategy overview — Business Model Canvas Template](https://businessmodelcanvastemplate.com/blogs/marketing-strategy/upstox-marketing-strategy)
• [Inside CTV's explosion in India — Storyboard18](https://www.storyboard18.com/how-it-works/inside-ctvs-explosion-how-brands-are-leveraging-immersive-storytelling-and-data-62756.htm)